Mac Your PC

Some final words

Repair permissions

Repair permissions is often seen as a general tonic for a whole range of problems. It’s not. It is considered good form to repair permissions after any major application install or system update. Fire up Disk Utility select your MAC OS X partition and click repair permissions.

Have a strategy

You can save yourself a lot of trouble along the way if you come up with a strategy for managing your extensions. Devise a folder structure and keep everything organized.

One possibility is:

‘/Users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/New’ – this is were you “land” new extensions.

‘/users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/Current’ as the base for a copy of your current setup. Inside this folder you create folders for Backup, Installed extra, Installed system. Versioning your backups if there is more than one of something isn’t a bad idea. You get the point, a little time now can save major headaches later. Burn these things to a disc every now and again so that you can do a fresh install without having to hunt down all you extensions.

Rescue disc

If your system panics when booting or you lose your keyboard and mouse, you need a way to get in and fix things.

You can try to boot into single user mode with the ‘-s’ flag, and then follow the instructions to check and then mount your disk. You’re then at a terminal prompt and ready to undo what caused the problem. This is easy because you’ve been keeping track of your changes, right.

If single user mode is a no go, the iPC install DVD gets you to a terminal (look in the utilities menu) and from there you can fix things.

An Ubuntu live CD will also get you access and you should have one on hand as a rescue of last resort.

Test these options out before things go wrong and you’ll be ready in the unlikely event of a water landing.

Dell 1525 Hackintosh specific

Additional and modified kernel extensions are NOT the only pieces required to get MAC OS X working our 1525’s, but they are a very big piece of the puzzle.

The Dell Inspiron 1525 has come a long way from the days of sleep hacks and other barely functional hardware. It is now possible to install from the retail DVD using a special pre-boot CD and have all of the functionality of the iPC install. A guide for this will be created in the future (still a little too early, but yes, it’s going to happen, so be patient please).

Here is a teaser. This is the list of the extensions added or modified to get retail MAC OS X up and running on a Dell 1525 (1280×800 display, Bluetooth, no web cam, Dell 1390/Broadcom 43xx WiFi, sleep mode 0 not hibernation). This list will change before a guide is published and as improvements are made over time. Do NOT rearrange your extensions based on this list. It won’t help and you may end up with a brick.

Installed in /Extra/Extensions

Disabler.kext – This extension, as the name implies, disables other extensions. In this case it disables: AppleEFINVRAM, AppleEFIRuntime, AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement, and ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin. This extension allows your system to boot and contributes greatly to reduced stress updates.

AppleDecrypt.kext – This decrypts portions of the kernel and the finder, getting around Apples efforts to limit MAC OS X to Apple hardware (Chameleon also plays a huge role).

UUID.kext – This provides a UUID (Universal Unique Identifier, based in part on your primary network interface mac address. Should be edited for your system. Not having a proper UUID set causes no end of headaches.

IO80211Family.kext – WiFi fix, loaded from Extra/Extensions overrides the original extension in /System/Library/Extensions

IOBluetoothFamily.kext – Enables Bluetooth on-off, overrides original

IONetworkingFamily.kext – Required as a dependancy for IO80211Family. AppleYukon2 in plugins edited for proper mac address. Overrides original.

Installed in /System/Library/Extensions

IOUSBFamily.kext – USB 2 speeds and hot plug fixes, replaces the original

AppleHDA.kext – Sound fix, replaces the original

HDAEnabler.kext – Sound

ClamshellDisplay.kext – Sleep/Wake with the lid

IOSDHCIBlockDevice.kext – SD card reader

VoodooBattery.kext – battery meter

VoodooPower.kext – Speed Step

VoodooPS2Controller – Keyboard and Trackpad

Only two extensions had to be replaced outright, making updating easier, and if Apple overwrites them it’s easy to put the modified extensions back if needed.

There are still improvements that need to be made before the retail install is ready for general use and support. Right now things are functionally equivalent to the iPC based install but far from the clean, vanilla goal. The Sigmatel Audio and Keyboard/Trackpad could stand some work. The shutdown panic (annoying but no real negative effect) while on battery issues continue and still no sign of HDMI or Modem support. The second release candidate of Chameleon, when it is released, and Chameleon documentation should fix the slow firewire problems and allow additional BIOS/EFI related configuration. DSDT.aml patches will allow removing ClamshellDisplay and the HDAEnabler. The exact configuration of Chameleon, DSDT.aml and Extensions is still a matter for consideration.

Extra credit commands

You can ignore these commands if you want, your not missing anything important. But if you’re curious…

What extensions are loaded

You can get some of this information from the system profiler but this command givers you a complete picture of what’s loaded and how they relate to each other.

‘sudo kextstat -l’ will list all the extensions loaded.

‘sudo kextstat -b org.voodoo.driver.PS2Keyboard’ shows the information for org.voodoo.driver.PS2Keyboard.

The kextstat command will list the extensions that are currently loaded (technically speaking, linked would be the correct term). Kextstat returns a large amount of information as seen in this excerpt of ‘sudo kextstat -l’:

27 2 0×2e4c8000 0×6000 0×5000 org.voodoo.driver.PS2Controller (1.1.0) <12>

…

32 0 0×340dd000 0×3000 0×2000 org.voodoo.driver.PS2Keyboard (1.1.0) <27 25 12>

we are concerned primarily with these (example value in parentheses):

Index – 1st (32)

References – 2nd the number of other extensions using this one (0)

Name – 6th (org.voodoo.driver.PS2Keyboard)

Version – 7th (1.1.0)

Linked against – 8th list of the indexes of the extensions this one is using (<27 25 12>).

This isn’t a command you would use very often. One use is to identify what would be the impact of removing an extension. In this example if I removed the extension with the index number 27, our example extension, 32, wouldn’t be able to load.

Testing an extension with kextload and kextunload

You can load and test an extension without installing it permanently on your system. It’s generally not that useful of a thing to do in this context, but if you want…

‘sudo kextload SomeExtension.kext’ - loads the extension. If your system panics, then you restart and no harm done.

‘sudo kextunload SomeExtension.kext’ - unloads the extension

Series Navigation

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Tags: boot-132, Dell Inspiron 1525, edit, help, how to, kext, Knowledge

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